It’s time our TV drama got out of this dismal rut
Plodding detective dramas, Scandi-noir wannabes, charmed lives unravelling – Chris Bennion has had enough
TKeeping one eye on an American or European audience can lead to dross
o give you an idea of the parlous state of British TV drama at the moment, a journalist tweeted that he had seen an upcoming series and joked that it may as well be called “Cop Solves Crime”. The most damning thing is, I had seen most of the upcoming British dramas on offer this autumn when I read that tweet, and I couldn’t work out which one he was referring to. “Cop Solves Crime”. “Middle-class Woman’s Seemingly Perfect Life Unravels”. “It’s a Bit Like Line of Duty”. Television commissioners largely pick from those three buckets at the moment.
So when did British TV drama, once considered the best in the world, become so safe, so predictable, so beige? This week ITV has The Tower, a perfectly solid detective drama with a very decent cast. Last week it had The Long Call, a perfectly solid detective drama with a very decent cast. These shows are tough to criticise, but they’re also tough to recommend.
This bland morass must be due, in part, to financial constraints. Networks are under pressure to squeeze every penny out of productions, which means any drama with a decent budget needs resale value. A familiar, middle-of-the-road drama with basic dialogue and every cliché under the sun is more likely to sell well in multiple global regions than something more innovative. Co-productions, which make financial sense, often water down artistic merit – why else has Channel 4 wheeled out the half-british, half-nordic nightmares that are Before We Die and Close to Me? Both shows look and sound like you are watching a badly dubbed European drama, set in Stockholm or Malmö. But, no, your eyes don’t deceive you, that really is Lesley Sharp, that really is St Leonards-on-sea.
In its desire for an international appeal, we are all experiencing déjà-vu. Take the titles: earlier this year on ITV we had Too Close; on Sunday night, on Channel 4, we had Close to Me. In December, Netflix will be treating us to Stay Close. Never has the British TV drama landscape so closely resembled the market for cheap paperback thrillers intended for the Tube commute. Presumably we can look forward to settling down with a (large) glass of pinot to enjoy Close Range, Close Up, Close to the Wind and Don’t Stand So Close (a Covid drama). All of them will be advertised with a blurb that uses the sentence: “And suddenly her seemingly perfect life is in freefall.” Most of them will star Joanne Froggatt.
Much television drama now is the result of co-productions with overseas investors. In the past, this has brought dividends, including Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective (famously a co-production between the BBC and Australia’s ABC). And more recently, shows such as Sky and HBO’S Chernobyl have proved the benefit of this approach. But keeping one eye on an American or European audience can also lead to a swathe of dross. Recent examples, Lie With Me and Van Der Valk, are proof that a large international budget is no guarantee of quality or a vivid palette.
It also works the other way. American networks such as PBS Masterpiece and Acorn TV hoover up middle-of-the-road British drama, in a similar manner in which we Brits used to devour anything Scandinavian, until we realised the subtitles were masking a multitude of sins.
And just as series such as The Killing spawned a thousand imitators, so did our own homegrown hits result in pale imitations. The BBC and ITV have long been trying to capture Doctor Foster’s melodrama lightning in a bottle, with knock-off dramas such as Liar, Trauma, Cheat and The Replacement. Those early imitators, though not great, did at least have some flair of their own. More recently in TV drama-land, where the only thing bigger than the Dartington Crystal wine glasses are the kitchen islands and the falls from grace of the protagonists, we’ve had to contend with Hollington Drive, Angela Black, The Stranger, Behind Her Eyes and
Finding Alice. All these dramas feature wealthy people in enormous houses having their lifestyle-magazine lives torn apart by unexpected events or ghosts from the past. Watch one, you’ve watched them all.
What is clear from these dramas is that we are in the age of Plot. They pride themselves on being televisual page-turners, with cliffhangers, volte-faces and twists galore, but these things are the cherry on the top of a good drama, not the cake itself. What is
Line of Duty but the sheer triumph of plot over all else? Character, dialogue, setting, humour, realism, surrealism – none of these things matter in comparison. Look at the BBC’S more recent series, Vigil and Showtrial, both clearly intended to fit snugly into the part of the viewer’s brain that misses Line of Duty. Neat, highconcept set-ups, followed by a barrage of plot. It is no coincidence that as you watch, you feel like you are reading a Dan Brown novel, groaning at the cheesy lines and hopeless coincidences, but too keen to find out what happens next to turn off.
It’s a depressing state of affairs. Recently, I began compiling a list of the best TV dramas of 2021 and I didn’t get far. Russell T Davies’s excellent but flawed It’s a Sin, Jimmy Mcgovern’s impassioned but unsubtle Time, Jack Thorne’s marvellous howl of outrage, Help, and Colin Farrell clubbing seals in The North Water – 13.5 hours of top-grade TV drama out of the UK in one calendar year. Happily, we still have Sarah Phelps’s A Very British Scandal to come.
We Brits, of course, still produce gold-standard TV dramas. Last year gave us Quiz, Small Axe, I Hate Suzie and I May Destroy You, all sensational, boundary-changing works. But all, crucially, driven by committed, singular creatives who, you imagine, would not budge on their artistic vision.
I have one suggestion that would instantly reinvigorate the TV drama landscape in this country. For a couple of years, no TV commissioner should be allowed to greenlight a thriller or a detective drama. And then they would see that, out there in the mists, there are swathes of brilliant writers with brilliant ideas that aren’t “and then her seemingly perfect life goes into freefall”. Enough freefall, enough wine glasses and kitchen islands and Boden catalogue “perfection”, enough secrets from the past. Let’s innovate.